


Evolutionary Development of the Family

by Pookaseraph



Series: CMUniverse [15]
Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Carnegie Mellon University, F/M, Family, Fluff, M/M, Medical, Pittsburgh, Thanksgiving, politics is bad dinner table discussion material
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-19
Updated: 2012-01-19
Packaged: 2017-10-29 19:44:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/323453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pookaseraph/pseuds/Pookaseraph
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony and Charles go over to the Lehnsherr's for Thanksgiving. There is awkwardness, and two pairs of people trying to pretend they aren't dating for appearances sake. Tony and Anya have their first fight and it's not about what you might think.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Evolutionary Development of the Family

**Author's Note:**

> Aaaand back to CMUniverse for a little bit. As always, unnecessary apologies go to everyone who's following CMUniverse and not my other work. At least now I don't feel guilty about neglecting Nation Building!
> 
> Non-USians: A lot should be understandable from context, but I do apologize for my slight joke at N. Yorkshire's expense. ILU horribly, I do. The VA is Veterans' Administration and is responsible for the care of veterans who have been wounded in action or fit certain poverty criteria.
> 
> ESRD: End-stage Renal Disease (aka kidney failure)
> 
> pop vs. soda vs. cola vs. coke: these all mean the same thing, and the word you use to describe it generally varies by region in the US.
> 
> NB fans: there is cake in this chapter, just for you.
> 
> 50 internet cookies to the first person to correctly identify the RAF base where Howard (and Tony) were located, and thus what Howard was likely doing there.

Tony and Charles arrived at the Lehnsherr's at 3:07pm with lots of cake. After making out with Anya in the back seat of the car for approximately three minutes, the two of them helped get Charles into the house and got the cakes safely inside. The whole thing was a bit of a _process_ but Tony was a practiced engineer, and he had many items in his box of tricks to get Charles around. So he had a little transportable mini-lift to deal with the stoop and then Charles was inside; the entire first floor of the house - and all it's carpet - was covered with thin plywood boards. Uncomfortable for everyone else, but it meant that Charles wouldn't snag in the ridiculously 70s shag carpet.

He wasn't certain why Charles got to be 'Mr. Charles' and he just got to be 'Tony' - probably the chair, it made Charles look like a grandpa sometimes, he should give it a new paint job - but he would accept being the young guy with aplomb. A few moments after they were in the door he'd been pounced on by Lehsherrs - wrong Lehnsherrs sadly, just Wanda and Pietro. He gave both of them a ride around the first floor and then dropped them off. It was... annoying, there were several small children that seemed to frequently be in Anya's vicinity and she actually seemed to _like_ them, so Tony always did his best to tolerate them and not stare at them too badly. The brilliant smile on Anya's face made it mostly worth it, however, and even the terrifying question 'oh god what if she wants kids?!' couldn't keep him down for long.

Charles ended up in the kitchen with Erik while Tony settled in to play Mario Kart 64 with Wanda and Pietro, semi-discretely leaning up against Anya's leg and using her as a pillow as he sat on the floor. She was wearing neatly fitted jeans. "No kilt?"

She gently kicked his hip in response.

"So... how's school?" He mostly addressed Wanda and Pietro. He'd talked to Anya just yesterday so there was nothing to tell on that front.

Pietro blew a raspberry. "I like art," was Wanda's response.

The three of them continued to race around tracks that Tony barely remembered from his own childhood. He and Charles' video gaming systems had long since upgraded to the modern generation trifecta and the only Triforce hunting and race car driving he did took place with a nunchuck and motion sensing anymore. "You know, school is very important and when I..."

He was about to give a 'when I was your age' speech. Suddenly he really wanted to do something irresponsible. Anya squeezed his shoulder, thumb running along the side of his neck where the twins couldn't see, and he felt a bit better. There was no good reason to give a speech, anyway. Kids were kids, sometimes it was nice to remember that ten year olds weren't supposed to be building robots and blowing things up out in quarries after school. He wasn't even certain what ten year olds did, probably something with bicycles... boring ones, without turbochargers.

Maybe he could make them turbocharged bikes. Anya would probably kill him. He sighed.

"Do you want a pop, Tony?"

He blinked, fairly certain they hadn't been over the acceptability of a laundry list of S&M actions _and_ she couldn't actually read his mind, and then remembered that _pop_ meant soda. "Yeah, sure. Charles and I brought some, too."

Anya came back with sodas for the kids and him and Charles and Erik came out from the kitchen with Lorna in tow. Erik was looking annoyed and Charles... yeah, cock blocked by a three year old. "Lorna, come on over here, we'll play Mario Kart."

Erik had better appreciate his massive assist in that department. He figured if he kept being helpful eventually Erik would accept his presence... like inoculation. Tony was going to inoculate Erik with his presence, like a disease. It was an excellent plan.

After she checked that it was alright with Charles, Lorna ended up practically screaming over, landing on Tony and then she started to tug at the controller, causing him to fall from a well placed first in battle mode to an epic failure of fourth place, even losing ground to the computer player as Lorna played rather spectacularly poorly. Charles breathed an obvious sigh of relief and Erik put his hand on the back of Charles' neck, not too overt, mostly hidden behind the chair, but Tony knew what he was looking for. He ended up with Anya behind him, her legs straddling his back. Yes, he was a Lehnsherr wrangler, grade A.

"So, I brought pie," he told the room at large. "Cherry and pumpkin." This went over well, and Erik and Charles used the disturbance to disappear back into the kitchen, hopefully for a brief snog because at least one of them should be getting some and it was most certainly not going to be him tonight! He would be lucky if he and Anya could find a private corner for a few minutes.

Really he shouldn't have been worried about private corners, still, Anya brushed her fingers along his neck and he felt a bit better, almost immediately. Semi-peaceful Mario Karting passed, and Mrs. Lehnsherr came home, introductions were made, Erik stopped standing so close to Charles and Tony stopped hovering behind Anya, Aunt Ethel showed up, followed by some grandparents who apparently lived in a nearby nursing home of some sort and had been driven over by van.

"Hey... You should have let me know, I have the Charlesmobile."

Anya elbowed him gently. "It's fine, it was out of your way."

Weirdly he found that he wouldn't have minded. Grandpa Lehnsherr actually had a bad leg, it seemed, a prosthetic attached at the knee, and he walked with a walker. Tony secretly thought a wheelchair might have been better - but that was his not so humble opinion given how awesomely Charles got around in one. Grandma Eisenhardt had a bad hip, liver spots, and the distinct jaundice of ESRD. After Magnus - which Tony thought was a hilarious first name until he realized that was actually also Erik's middle name - got inside he settled into a wheelchair.

He watched the man slowly make his way in to the living room, and parked next to the couch containing Anya. "Grandpa," she got up, hugged him and kissed him on the cheek. "This is Tony, he goes to school with Erik."

"Sir." He shed Lorna, who was more than capable of failing to play Mario Kart on her own, and put out his hand. He man's grip was strong, and he was surprisingly fit for a man of his age. He was tall, it was clear where Erik - and even to a lesser extent Anya, who was barely an inch shorter than he was - got it.

Charles rolled in a moment later, and Anya continued the introductions. "And this is Charles, he's also Erik's friend from school."

Charles also gave a 'sir' and a handshake while Magnus was sizing him up. Tony realized that Charles actually cut an impressive figure like that, in slim jeans and a neatly tailored sweater, one of the ones that showed off that he hit the gym daily and Tony was lucky to make it twice a week.

"Iraq or Afghanistan?"

"Nothing so patriotic, I'm afraid." Magnus winced, and Tony wondered why. "Vietnam?"

Magnus grunted.

"Thank you for your service." Charles always made it sound like he meant it. Tony could never manage the same sincerity, even when he meant it.

"You're British?"

"Completely American. I spent a very impressionable two years in Oxford with my father."

"Is that why you don't have a British accent, Tony?" Anya asked.

"Oh, I have a British accent, Charles has declared it a weapon of mass destruction, largely because I spent most of _my_ time in North Yorkshire." God his accent was a muddled mess, that's what you got for spending most of your time on a US/UK RAF base with boys from all over the current and former Colonies. "Unlike other folks, I am a decent man, and have cultivated an American accent." Besides, they couldn't have America's future golden boy for guns, weapons, battle armor, missiles, and drones have a poncy accent. Charles made drugs and medical devices, it was all well and good for him to sound like an Oxford export.

"Wait," Anya looked at him, eyes narrow. "You have a British accent?"

Tony's first response 'it doesn't matter because it's not sexy' was bitten off at the pass - thankfully. "It's a mess, believe me."

Anya _pouted_ at him. Tony closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Accents were funny things, they were solidified largely in the early childhood time and stuck forever. Charles had spent that time with posh and educated professors and sons of Eton and Harrow, Tony spent it with airmen. He'd spent many a year after the fact relearning his vowels and how to shape his mouth, actually largely by mimicking Howard. It was harder to drop all of that training away, now, than it was to fall back on the accent.

"I really don't think anyone would care for it," he said, watching as Anya actually cocked her head trying to understand what he was saying. "But there's only so much you can do when you learn how to talk from RAF boys."

Anya snorted. "Why were you there?"

Tony frowned, trying to put the accent back away. "Reasons. Howard was doing some consulting."

Anya huffed at him. "What _sort_ on consulting?"

Tony was trying to think of a polite way to say 'Anya, hun, top secret consulting, the sort with missiles and radars and math that makes even _my_ head spin' when Magnus interrupted him.

"Anya, dear, you don't ask what sort of consulting people do on military bases. Howard, you said, and Tony?"

"Anthony Edward, actually."

"Stark." It wasn't a question, Tony tilted his head. Magnus nodded, impressed, and Tony relaxed, just a touch. Veterans went one of two ways, really, loved him or hated him. While they were in, generally it was all smiles and cheers, after they were out... well it really depended on if they got too close to a frag mine or any other number of things that were meant to hit the enemy but really no matter how smart there were always casualties. "I met your father."

Tony considered the man across from him for a moment, honestly trying to collect himself. He didn't do well with these sorts of conversations, the 'I knew your father' conversations. Anya's grandfather likely didn't know how much of an emotional minefield the declaration could be. It usually sent Tony into a corner to huddle, or into a spiraling mess of self-doubt or anxiety or guilt. Anya sat down beside him and squeezed his hip lightly.

"Ubon?" He finally asked.

Magnus nodded.

"Air Force, then. Pilot or Tech?"

"Tech."

"Love a good tech," Tony admitted, freely. He turned to Anya. "Back in Vietnam, most planes were ridiculous, and every base had a contractor technician from all the companies whose product was in the plane, Howard was in Thailand..." He thought about it, turned to Charles. "1963 to '73, I guess, off and on."

Charles nodded in confirmation.

"So if something was messed up for the morning ride, pilot tells tech, tech fixes it or brings it to the consultant, and it's ready for the afternoon fly. It was all a glorious synergy."

Magnus... well he was actually... smiling. It was weird. He wasn't used to people smiling at him, well, girls, but this was not a girl-smiling-at-him smile (or a boy-smiling-at-him-the-way-girls-usually-did smile, thank god) this was just some bizarre sort of contentment. Tony smiled back.

"That's... the business, now," he told Anya. "I mean... Stark Industries has energy departments, medtech, of course, but people don't remember Lockheed for their Information Systems."

Anya, however, was not smiling, she was frowning, a lot. Oh dear. She got up, brushed her hands down her jeans, gave her grandfather and grandmother a kiss on the cheek before fleeing to the back yard. He managed to barely resist running after her and making it _blisteringly obvious_ that he was worried that she was upset.

Magnus, at least, seemed to realize at least part of the problem. "She's sixteen. War always seems unnecessary when you're sixteen."

"I'm certain some of her classmates are talking..." Talking about joining up. He wasn't an idiot, he knew where soldiers came from, especially in this day and age. Boys like Tony and Charles went to war - if they went to war at all - as government contracting brains, they didn't carry guns. "Bit of a vicious cycle, isn't it?"

Magnus actually shrugged. "Couldn't say."

Xavier and Stark, as families, as companies, were so wrapped up in _America_ that sometimes it was hard to see where certain pieces of his company ended and the US Government began. Hell, he had actual air force, current and former, on the payroll of the company, that much he knew. Charles... well he knew Charles didn't care for all of it, but it wasn't like Xavier Biotech was _just_ trying to cure cancer.

"If you'll excuse me?" Lehnsherr nodded and Tony got up.

Charles giving his shoulder a squeeze as he passed and then he found Anya outside, shivering in the cool evening air. She'd headed outside in just a t-shirt, really, it wasn't meant for the weather. Tony wasn't much better dressed for it, but he walked over to where she was curled on the porch, a little ratty porch swing tucked away mostly hidden from potential prying eyes.

"Hey..." He didn't know what to say, what he'd stepped in, really.

"Hey." And Anya gave him nothing to work with.

"Look, I..." He struggled for _anything_ to say.

"You're not your company, I know, you can't buy companies because it's funny... but..." She looked at him. At least she hadn't been crying. "Your company really does that? Makes guns and weapons?"

"Yeah." It wasn't like he could deny it. At least a third of their revenue was a fucking line item on the congressional budget. "We make planes and guns and missiles and bombs and rockets and drones and armor."

"Is that what you're going to do when you run it? Make bombs?"

He was silent for a long time, but finally he nodded. "Yeah. We have... thousands of aerospace engineers, other engineers. It's what we do."

" _Why?!_ "

He had flip answers, 'when people stop hating our way of life, I'll stop making bombs', but it seemed a bit hollow. "My dad..." He coughed, chest tight, but Anya offered him no support there, no reassuring squeeze. "He always said that men and women were going to be put in harm's way, regardless, so why not have the best between them and harm's way. There's plenty of technology, stuff that was originally for a military purpose, in one way or another, and then it came home and improved our way of life, here."

"So you think war's necessary?"

Tony was regretting ever coming out here, but eventually he managed to nod. "Yes, sometimes."

"This war, this one right now?"

Charles would have something brilliant to say, Tony knew he would. "I think... it could have been handled better."

Anya sighed. "Maybe you can date my grandpa, since you like him so much." She got up, and Tony reached out, hand on her wrist, just trying to keep her from walking away and... god she looked upset.

"Anya..." she didn't pull away, at least. "It's... four generations of life's work. Howard, Edward, Howard, and Anthony... we've been building things that fly and blow up since World War I." He and Charles never talked about it directly but... the idea that they would ever do _anything_ other than sit at the head of Stark Industries and Xavier Biotech were unthinkable. They didn't go into robotics and bioengineering just for their health, Charles' health...

"Can't you...?" She frowned at him.

"We sell to the good guys, Anya. What we do... it's... it's why more men and woman come home alive." He honestly and truly believed that. He did.

"I don't like it."

"I can't stand in between the US and terrorists with my hands out and say 'woah woah wait I think we've got this all wrong'. It... doesn't work that way."

"You're too young to be that cynical, Tony."

"... No, I'm really not." God he was old. Nineteen and he'd never felt older. "I can see this is going to be a fight that's not getting resolved today, so..." He couldn't believe he was going to say this... "can we go inside, handle this like grownups and not let the kids see we were fighting?"

The corners of her mouth turned up, and then she snorted. "Did you just call my brother and sisters 'the kids'?"

"I think I did." He was trying to decide if that was weird, incestuous, or just awkward, when she reached out and squeezed his hand.

"We're talking about this later."

He was fairly certain that he, like so many other men before him, was learning to loathe the phrase 'we need to talk'. With Anya it seemed to be shaping up to be a mix, sometimes after that he got blow jobs, other times he got his future life's work criticized and dismissed. He decided he wanted more of the first, less of the second.

The actual dinner seemed like something of an understatement after the minor dust up. There was turkey, potatoes, and stuffing, all the various traditional accouterments that made Tony sort of wonder where the 'Jewish food' was, but it wasn't a Jewish holiday and there _weren't_ shrimp, so maybe that was as much culture as he was going to get for the day.

He dropped Charles and Erik off on campus - their closest stop from the Lehnsherr residence - and then took Grandma Eisenhardt back to her nursing home, and Grandpa Lehnsherr back to the VA nursing home, and then he and Anya ended up over in Schenley Park curled up in the back of the car, not really talking as he tried to sort out what the hell to even say to her.

"It's a moot point until I'm twenty-one anyway. I'm completely locked out from exercising my controlling interest in the company."

Anya prodded his side. He wriggled.

"Hey! I'm just being realistic here."

She rolled so she was half on top of him, her forearms pressing across his chest, leaning heavily on him. "You're the one who's constantly on me about how I can do anything, I can go to college, I can go work at Charles' company, or anywhere, I can be anything, and you're just... what? A guy who runs a company that sells weapons and nothing's going to change that ever?"

Why did she have to _look_ at him like that? "Probably." He looked up at her and frowned. "Three generations of Starks have done exactly that. I mean..." He wasn't going to say it... wasn't going to be an asshole, but he was fairly certain that Edward Stark had dropped Allied troops on top of Nazis. He reached up and ran his fingers along her cheeks. "Charles made me take ethics courses at MIT."

She snorted, and then kissed him. "I'm still not happy."

"Please don't ask me for something I can't give." Because he knew he would _try_ and damn that would be a wreck, and he would probably be conflicted, the same sort of conflicted that had him confessing to his girlfriend's brother how much his girlfriend meant to him when he couldn't quite get the same words out to her and... "I adore you."

"Kiss me?"

"That, I can do." He rolled her over and kissed her, hard. "Please tell me you didn't throw rocks at someone at the G-20 two years ago, dating people with a criminal record is so messy for the clearance..."

"Tony, _you_ have a criminal record."

"Don't tell Erik." It was just for kids stuff anyway, joyriding, a little alcohol, a little self-destructive behavior when his brain wasn't on right.

"You might want to tell Erik to not ask _Google_ then."

He flopped on to his back. "You're right! Dear Larry, please remove all mentions of me being a horrible cad from the internet, love, Tony."

She prodded his side. "It's less funny when you might actually be able to do that."

"Please, I make hits, my internet presence is not going anywhere, even if I do ask Larry."

She stuck her tongue out at him so he kissed her again, and then texted Charles to get his and Erik's pants back on before swinging back around to pick up Erik, and he returned both Lehnsherrs to their front door, looking vaguely rumpled and not in each other's eyes.


End file.
